This is why you don't put jokes on the page

Agree, DeskMonkey. He really was the lesser perpetrator. He fucked up, but not enough to end his journalism career, which is probably the case here.

At least he's young enough to make a career change. The older coworker may have done him a favor in the long run.

 

Not sure about this. The kid has to be smart enough to realize no LEO would ever say such an inflammatory thing. But maybe like a lot of places, he was working too fast to even process it.

 

We three copy editors working tonight (I'm reading this during dinner break) had a good discussion about this. Not much sympathy here for either copy editor.

Most of our gallows humor/smartass comments are oral, not written, and this is why.

I know about honest mistakes which happen because you're rushing or were interrupted in the middle of laying out a page ... believe me, I've made those errors (in the December craziness, I left an obit mug box nameline as "Name" instead of typing in the deceased's name. Nobody caught it on the proof and I rightfully got a chew out for that).

But this is somebody screwing around, causing harm to the public official, reporter and entire newspaper. They deserved to be fired. Good luck to KY and all the other people at the paper who will be dealing with the fallout for quite a while.

 

Not so much livid as she was petrified, I would say. All the heat, from what I could tell early on in the day, was squarely on her. And then, as my editor and publisher's investigation began, it became clear that she wasn't at fault.

 

Yeah, I'm sure she was terrified of what was coming. I sure wouldn't want to be caught in the middle of that.

 

So, did those two copy editors even show up for work today or were they head off at the pass?

 

As far as I know, they were both in the building at one point and then called into a meeting with the publisher and editor. They were both gone by the time I got to work around 3:30.

 

How exactly did it happen in the proof process? Or did it not?

 

I feel for the editor, too, who had to endure a nightmare no journalist wants to have — running a correction and apology because a couple fools who didn't take their job very seriously.

 

I encountered a shit sandwich of the sort — the proverbial turd in the punch bowl at the company office party — about 21 years ago during the cut-and-paste era, where a composing person was fired shortly after butchering my high school football game story on the hometown team, which was playing its arch-rival on the road.

Somehow, the legs of type were incorrectly placed by the composer, completely embarrassing the newspaper and myself. It appeared in the paper that Saturday that the hometown player was tackled by his own teammate, followed by a quote from their coach saying, "That was a huge play in the game."

This was before the internet, mind you, so there was no web to fix the digital version.

Being the sports editor, who wasn't on the desk that night, traveling back from the game, I transmitted the story to my managing editor in plenty of time for him to thoroughly proof the page. After not sleeping that night after reading a copy at around 1 a.m., I felt compelled to run a correction in the fledgling five-days-a-week paper on the following Monday.

It stated: Because of a composing error, type in the football game story was inadvertently placed out of order in Saturday's edition. We regret the error.

Realizing that wasn't enough, I also ran the full game story in that Monday edition, even though the managing editor didn't think it was worth running a retraction. I wonder how many readers kept both of the stories for their football scrapbook? I felt like my readers looked at me different, like I was incompetent.

I was livid, the managing editor didn't say much, and the publisher was shocked.

The lady who made the errors was fired shortly thereafter. She had been warned about it before because of previous gaffes that infuriated the writers and editors and embarrassed the paper.

My relationship with other co-workers was never the same after that, especially the managing editor, it seemed.

The trust was never the same.


I left for a better-paying job at a bigger and much-better paper a few months later.

 

Mine wasn't a joke that slipped through the editing process. Sheer incompetence; maybe sabotage. That managing editor is still stuck at that miserable paper.

 

Oh, he fucked up. I'm not denying that. But it's a different level of dumb than the other guy.